The Lead

Bill Highleyman Managing Editor of Availability Digest, discusses placing trust in the public cloud and how specific examples of cloud failures, some by large and well respected companies, demonstrate that the technology still has a long way to go,

Weekly news and features for business continuity professionals

Customers can now access SunGard’s heritage and experience in multi-layered Workplace Recovery solutions in combination with Regus’ unparalleled network of almost 1,300 business centers located in more than 550 cities across 97 countries: SunGard manages the contract so customers need only to call one number to invoke the service in time of need.

In January 2011, Australia's third-largest city came to a standstill when torrential rains caused the Brisbane River to burst its banks and flood much of the CBD and surrounding suburbs. Bryn Orr and Alem Saric, Emergency Management Consultants at Trimevac, speak with Continuity Insights about the level of preparedness prior to the floods, recovery efforts, lessons learned and the shark that was spotted on a suburban street.

In order to overcome the numerous challenges associated with the recovery, Convergys employed workload transition, work-at-home implementation, mobile work-area-recovery, alternate site identification and build-out, and satellite connectivity. Additionally, a tiered incident command team was used to assess the impacts of the flooding and administer the solutions.

A disaster preparedness exercise to ensure California's child support system could be run remotely went smoothly, except for one casualty: the names, Social Security numbers and other private records of about 800,000 adults and children.

We are lucky that the business continuity industry has a number of prominent noble aspects: Protecting employees and helping customers affected by disaster, to name two. Being able to see the positive results of a plan or initiative provides us with motivation and helps us perform to the best of our abilities.

In the 1964 movie Fail-Safe, a technical malfunction in the Pentagon's strategic control system causes an erroneous order to be sent to a B-58 squadron on a routine training mission instructing the bombers to fly beyond their fail-safe distance. At this point, the flight crews are trained to cease communications and prepare to fulfill their objective by bombing Moscow. As the planes near their target, the crisis deepens and together the Americans and Soviets decide on a final, desperate solution.

When you plan your work area space, make sure you anticipate not just day one needs, but also how end user requirements will change over time. Have a handle on the amount and configuration of space so that growth can occur without disrupting the recovery operation that is already in place.

Having been in this great industry of continuity and recovery for almost 30 years, I have seen many trends evolve, or come and go. One of those trends, which seems to have firmly planted itself, is the trend towards organizations migrating from a shared recovery solution to one that utilizes internal or dedicated, but in all cases, non-shared resources.